The present invention relates to electro-optical devices such as display devices, printer shutters or the like which may employ various kinds of electro-optical elements such as liquid-crystal, plasma, EL or electrochromic elements.
There has heretofore been known one type of electro-optical device which has an electro-optical panel having electrodes extending parallel to each other at substantially equal distances and lead terminals for the electrodes, and a circuit board having terminals corresponding to the lead terminals, and in which the electro-optical panel and the circuit board are electrically connected together through a rubber connector which is formed by alternately laminating an electrically conductive rubber material and an insulating rubber material with a sufficiently small pitch so that one or more conductive portions of the connector are in contact with the electrode surface of one lead terminal at all times. Such an electro-optical device is disclosed, for example, in Japanese Utility Model Publication No. 58-46450 (46450/1983).
The above-described conventional electro-optical device suffers, however, from the following disadvantages. As shown in FIG. 2, the conventional device is provided with a frame 5 made of a metal or resin material for compressibly securing the electro-optical panel 1 and the connector 3 to the circuit board 2 in order to enable the electrode surfaces of the lead terminals of the electro-optical panel 1 and those of the circuit board 2 to be brought into sufficiently close contact with the conductive portions of the rubber connectors 3 so that the contact resistance is minimized. Since the frame 5 is disposed in close proximity with the electro-optical panel 1 which uses glass or the like as a substrate thereof, if external force is applied to the device, for example, when it is accidentally dropped, the glass substrate may collide with the frame 5 on impact, resulting in destruction of the substrate.
To assemble this electro-optical device, two long flexible connectors 3 are placed at predetermined positions, respectively, on the circuit board 2 in such a manner that the connectors 3 stand as straight as possible, and the electro-optical panel 1 is placed on the connectors 3 by visually adjusting the positions of the connectors 3 so that the electrode terminals of the panel 1 coincide with the upper ends of the connectors 3, which involves considerably inferior operating efficiency and also variations in the positional accuracy.